Smalls_Intro_P2R1_01-24-06.qxd 17/2/06 2:31 AM Page 1 Introduction IN 1932, WHEN MOST AMERICANS were still reeling from the devastating effects of eco- nomic depression, Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964)—perhaps black America’s most notori- ous white supporter and patron of the arts—decided to give up his career as a theatre critic and novelist of light fiction and to become a full-time amateur photographer instead. He was introduced to the possibilities of photography through a friend, the noted Mexican car- icaturist Miguel Covarrubias (1904–1957), who had just returned from a trip abroad with a new Leica camera.1 The Leica was the first small, hand-held, and lightweight camera designed Ito use inexpensive 35mm film. The new invention quickly became popular with profession- als and amateurs alike and Van Vechten wasted no time in purchasing one for himself. It was at that moment that he started giving serious attention to photography as an art form.2 Van Vechten’s sudden switch from literary pursuits to photography was not all that unusual considering his privileged social position and his flippant approach to art and life. It was through photography that Van Vechten could continue to exploit the light, the witty, and the whimsical beyond the written page. Although some observers were enamored of his carefree outlook, others were not. His attitude toward life in general and his refusal to take the correlation between art and politics seriously was to remain one bone of contention between him and many African-American creative and intellectually astute minds of the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1930s, the wealthy white New York society matron and patron of the arts, Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962), endearingly observed of Van Vechten that he was inclined to treat all aspects of life lightheartedly and as amusing.3 In almost everything he did, Van Vechten’s expressed desire was to portray “extremely serious themes as frivolously as possi- ble.”4 In the literary world, he had gained the reputation as someone who loved the exotic, the bizarre, and the trivial. His off-handed and matter-of-fact approach to sober themes and subjects was to become the hallmark of his fiction, criticism, and photography. 5 His goal in photography was, among other things, to combine his carefree attitude toward his social life with his interest as collector and patron. Smalls_Intro_P2R1_01-24-06.qxd 17/2/06 2:31 AM Page 2 2 INTRODUCTION Several years before introducing Van Vechten to the new camera technology, Covar- rubias had satirized his friend’s notorious obsession with African-American culture in a 1926 caricature titled A Prediction in which Van Vechten was showcased as a black man with discernible “negroid” facial features (Fig. 1). Around the same time, the influential maga- zine Vanity Fair took note of Van Vechten’s negrophilic obsessions in derisively declaring that he was “getting a heavy tan.”6 In a review of Van Vechten’s notoriously salacious novel Nigger Heaven, which appeared in 1926, the playwright Avery Hopwood went so far as to jokingly alert readers to the possibility that Van Vechten was an imposter and not white at all. In a letter addressed directly to Van Vechten, Hopwood stated: “I am explaining that you really see little of Harlem these days, but that you saw a great deal of it before you passed. They are all surprised to hear about your Negro strain, but I tell them that your best friends always knew.”7 What Hopwood was hinting at was Van Vechten’s indulgence in what has been termed “racechange”—that is, the “traversing of race boundaries, racial imitation or impersonation, cross-racial mimicry or mutability, white posing as black or black passing as white, pan- racial mutuality.”8 The phenomenon, as forming a critical nexus in the birth and shifting foundations of American modernism, both unveils and questions interracial contacts and cross-cultural mixings. The dynamics of these cross currents are volatile, ongoing, incom- plete, and, like identity itself, can not be denied, ignored, or oversimplified. As Van Vechten’s private photography suggests, the traversing of sexual and racial boundaries operated as a theatrical metaphor for Van Vechten who, in his social life, consciously played multiple roles through which he projected himself as avid guardian, artist, patron, victim, and savior to black America. His multiple social, literary, and artistic activities garnered him a key posi- tion in the social and cultural imagination of both whites and African Americans. The cal- culated and impassioned exploitation of African Americans and their culture was to become Van Vechten’s ticket to notoriety and fortune. Of all the movers and shakers in the Harlem Renaissance who became instrumental in forging a unique brand of American modernism in New York in the years spanning the 1920s through to his death in 1964, Carl Van Vechten was undeniably the best known and most influential—easily earning a reputation as an expert on uptown night life, the rhythms of Harlem, and its black inhabitants through his activities as novelist, music and dance critic, patron of the arts, and photographer. As a powerful catalyst keeping “the Negro in vogue” for almost five decades, Van Vechten was an essential asset to many aspiring African-American artists and writers. His acquaintance with influential black and white socialites and cultural notables afforded him ready entrée into exclusive dance, opera, music, and theatre circles. He was well connected in the white-owned and white-operated world of publishing and gave many African-American artists their first break by introducing them and their work to important whites in key positions of power. Van Vechten’s unwavering passion for writing, theatre, photography, and philanthropy afforded him a noteworthy status as “midwife to the Harlem Renaissance.”9 Over a span of more than three decades, Van Vechten produced thousands of photo- graphs on a wide range of subjects. These, along with his literary oeuvre, constitute a mas- sive body of work that has yet to be examined within the context of twentieth-century Smalls_Intro_P2R1_01-24-06.qxd 17/2/06 2:31 AM Page 3 INTRODUCTION 3 American modernist practice.10 In photography, Van Vechten specialized in portraits of both white and African-American artists, writers, and other individuals of social and cultural prominence.11 These portraits tackled identity formation as desired by the sitter and forged by the photographer. As celebrations of racial and cultural diversity, they were most unusual for the period in visually documenting, in the best manner possible, those African Americans who contributed to America’s cultural richness in the formative years of its engagement with modernism. They also helped to underscore the later observation made by Susan Sontag that “photography has the power to turn people into objects that can be symbolically pos- sessed . to appropriate the thing photographed . means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.”12 As a docu- mentarian and collector of rare and extraordinary people as objects of art, Van Vechten took full advantage of the possibilities photography afforded. He was aware that he pushed his obsessions for collecting and cataloguing to extremes when, in added reference to portrait photography, he proudly referred to himself as “an obstinate cataloguer.”13 It has been noted of Van Vechten’s public portrait photography that issues of identity, role-playing, and fabrication are forcefully in evidence. These same characteristics clearly invade his private work. Considering that his own identity was complex and multiple, it is more than likely that his approach to the topics of race and race relations was just as multi- faceted, multiple, and fickle. His public and private photographs indicate the dizzying com- plexities involved in representing the self through the other—complexities that become more charged in the context of his relationship to the African-American community of Harlem.14 Van Vechten’s prominence within the worlds of theatre, music, and the performing arts, allowed him a facility in fostering friendships with social and cultural notables of all races. White European and Euro-American elites included the French filmmaker, visual artist, and writer Jean Cocteau, the surrealist painter Salvador Dali, the photographer Man Ray, the artists Pavel Tchelitchew, Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and a host of others. Van Vechten man- aged to photograph all of these individuals and many others at least once.15 Indeed, to do so Van Vechten must have commanded a considerable clout of access. Bruce Kellner, one of Van Vechten’s biographers, lists over one thousand Van Vechten photographs of black and white celebrities—and these are only those that have been catalogued so far. There exists perhaps at least that many more! As will become evident throughout this account, the act of photography itself was crit- ical to Van Vechten’s psychological and social definition. Not only was his intention to use it as outlet for both artistic expression and instrument of cultural/racial documentation, he also employed the medium as a means of popular myth-making about himself in relation- ship to African Americans and to modern gay culture—a strategy that helped to bolster his success and notoriety during and even after the period of “negromania” (an obsessive fasci- nation with black people and their culture) that typified the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten’s photographs of black and white cultural elites came to public attention in 1935 when they were exhibited at the Second International Leica Exhibition of Photog- raphy in New York amid the works of other noteworthy American photographers who included Cecil Beaton, George Platt Lynes, and Edward Steichen.